Bay 12 Games Forum
Finally... => Life Advice => Topic started by: sprinkled chariot on February 05, 2016, 01:20:35 pm
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Hello bayers.
I have decided to drop the weight from 78 kg to 73 kg, but there are some problems
- usual solution aka jogging is not an option, because ICE, and I might not be able to afford sport club.
- Decreasing ammount of calories/ sweet stuff in my diet leads to improvement for ahort period, but then willpower suddenly switches off, I start overeating and my lost kg say hello. This leads to sense of guilt and even more overeating, and I am back on the starting point :(
Any ideas or advices would be appreciated( except skiing, fuck skiing)
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Well, my roommate lost a bunch of weight by doing two things.
1) Not buying/drinking sodas.
2) Replacing his most boring meal of the day (the lunch he prepares for work) with a big-ass salad.
Not sure if that helps, but if you aren't already doing #1, that should probably do that at least.
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1) Not buying/drinking sodas.
Are diet sodas okay? I mean, they still have sodium and the acid's bad for your teeth, but they don't have any calories.
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1) Not buying/drinking sodas.
Are diet sodas okay? I mean, they still have sodium and the acid's bad for your teeth, but they don't have any calories.
just stay away from all of it.
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If you're willing to risk horrible happenings, Ulysses Contract. You write down a secret of yours that you don't want told on a piece of paper, seal it in an envelope, give the envelope to a friend. You make your friend promise to open the envelope and reveal its contents to the public if you fail your goals.
Masssive negative incentive. As I've learned from economics, incentives work!
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- usual solution aka jogging is not an option, because ICE,
You radiate of wisdom. Seriously. Despite having slipped on ice a few of occasions, I still run on iced sidewalks. BUT when I do use common sense, here's what I do:
-Jog slower.
-Find some grass or non-slippery surfaces to run on. This might not be an option if there's too much snow or the place is too wet.
-If you have roads clear of heavy traffic (and ice) in your area, run on them.
-Compact snow on the ground usually covers ice, but there's still risk of course.
-Exercise indoors. It's cramped, but every little bit counts.
I'm not too familiar with dieting or gym memberships so I can't really help you out there. Then again my winter exercise advice is kind of sparse as I usually throw caution away and run in all kinds of crazy weather. Nevertheless, good luck loosing weight.
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1) Not buying/drinking sodas.
Are diet sodas okay? I mean, they still have sodium and the acid's bad for your teeth, but they don't have any calories.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25231862/
In short, no, they can cause "glucose intolerance," by altering the gut microbiome. In the study they reversed it by basically nuking the gut flora with antibiotics. (glucose intolerance leads to type two diabetes, iirc)
Personally I just stopped drinking soda cold turkey (15 years ago!). It's not like it's heroin or alcohol or anything.
Btw, margarine is also worse for you than butter. Go figure.
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Any ideas or advices would be appreciated
Sometimes working out more is easier than eating less. i recommend you find an athletic hobby. Going to the gym boring and eats up a lot of time time going there and back, changing, showering , etc. Whereas if you decide to really love playing DDR, or swimming, or playing ice hockey or whatever, it's much easier to bring yourself to do it.
The ideal situation is that you "need 5 hours of workout per week" but you actually do 10 without ever even counting, because the athletic thing you do is a lot of fun and you'd do it anyway even if you didn't care about your weight.
Plus, that way you can eat all the chocolate cake and ice cream and soda you want without worrying about it.
That said, depending on your circumstances it might also help to make sure that you're eating enough of important things, like protein.
Are diet sodas okay?
No. There are some studies (https://www.google.com/#q=diet+soda+makes+you+fat) that show that diet soda can contribute to weight gain. Some are theorizing that it has something to do with intestinal bacteria processing the stuff that your body can't digest. Others are suggesting that it's purely psychological, and if you "feel good" about drinking "yay diet" soda, you tend to not feel as obligated to work out as much. There seems to not be a strong consensus. But either way, they're also generally bad for you in other ways. Heart risk, diabetes, causes headaches, etc (http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20739512,00.html). if you can, drink water. If you can't, it might be better to drink regular sugar soda over diet and simply deal with the extra calories.
Again, easier to work out more than to always feel hungry and like you're suffering and not enjoying the things you like.
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Take it from me--someone who basically drank soda 24/7 all his life--once your off soda (all soda), you'll FEEL sooo much better. It's night and day.
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Exercise, as far as free bodyweight exercise that you can do literally everywhere, there are so many sites devoted to this sort of thing:
http://www.nerdfitness.com/resources/
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/08/05/the-prisoner-workout/
two of my favourites
Also, as far as being able to resist cravings, this may sound completely unrelated, but have you seen Star Wars the Force Awakens? Cause there's something that the main villain does that has really helped take my mind off eating stuff like chocolate and ice cream
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those are nice links. i have been looking for free bodyweight exercises for a while, and they seem to have a good list.
Although I need them for the exact opposite reason ( need to gain weight)
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I'm shedding a few kilos at the moment myself, since I put on weight while studying at college.
Don't "diet" since everyone rebounds from that. You need to adjust your eating behavior long-term. If you don't enjoy your food, it won't stick.
First, you need to make a good inventory of what you consume when, work out the macros (protein, carbs, fat) involved, and work out when you tend to "slip" and do something silly and expensive such as takeout (plan a meal or "good" snacks for these times).
Basically, having a good meal plan is 90% of the way to fixing up your diet. Make sure you're eating at set times, set amounts, and have things in between to keep you going. A small meal every three hours is more effective and easier to stick to, than eating three meals a day and starving for 4 hours between meals.
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Shovel snow for the elderly. It burns more calories than jogging, and you get to feel good about yourself.
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http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/exercise/art-20050999?pg=1
10 hours in a week doing something that burns ~1000 calories per hour burns ~10,000/7=~1400 calories per day. One pound of fat is 3500 calories. So that sounds fairly fast... But if you're eating ALL THE CAKE AND ICE CREAM you may add more calories than you're burning. :P
P.S. Only the really strenuous stuff was around 1k calories per hour. Most of the activities they listed were much less.
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Your maths is correct, except your idea about how much calories you can burn with any reasonable exercise routine is way off.
http://www.livestrong.com/article/540717-how-many-calories-does-one-hour-of-aerobic-cardio-burn/
For example, jumping jacks will burn < 300 calories per hour, so you'd be looking at around 5 hours a day of constant jumping jacks to burn 1400 calories per day, and that's definitely going to be bad for strain on muscles and joints. But you could mix that up with other aerobics that are of equal intensity as jumping jacks, as long as you keep bouncing around for a total of 5 hours a day ...
Mountain biking is more reasonable, it's listed at around 600 calories per hour and will definitely be easier on your body that the aerobics, but still that would be around 2.5 hours per day of continuous full-speed pedaling to hit 1400 calories.
Actually, reality check: around 1 hour a day of vigorous exercise is definitely not going to burn a pound of fat every three days. If it was that easy then people would just be able to adjust their weight in no time flat.
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As far as eating, I know someone who accomplished something around 20 kilos of loss by entirely adjusting where she ate and how much she exercised. The former is the most interesting, as she cut way back on how much she bought fast food/ate out in general. By prepping meals at home, you have a lot more control over what you eat - if what she did works for you (it might not; this is a very granular thing to do mass speculation on) you might not even have to change much of what you eat. She still eats things like bacon, eggs, and coffee for breakfast and cooks things like hamburgers and pork chops for dinner, albeit with plenty of other things in there to eat, such as salads and pastas and whatnot.
It is critical to note, however, that exercise is vitally important to the whole thing, and that just trying to lose the weight isn't going to change anything in the long term. As stressed by others, it's a lifestyle change.
Completely unrelated: The topic title is making my inner grammar nazi happy, just because it's funny to imagine.
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What others have said about kicking soda to the curb. I didn't exactly have weight to lose when I stopped drinking it, but I felt better in a really visceral way. That, and replacing it with water helps digestion.
If you've got simple ways to introduce more physical activity into your daily routine, make use of those. If you can walk to work in <30 minutes, walk instead of driving. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Stuff like that. It won't get you ripped in the way that daily manual labor or gym visits will, but it'll help take the edge off.
But yeah. Problem is, if you can't overpower your own weak will, you're not going to get very far regardless of what you try. Step one is always going to be training yourself to deny backsliding impulses. Step two is figuring out food that's both relatively healthful and enjoyable to eat--salads in particular are a thing where the proper touch makes all the difference, though the same applies to some degree to everything. A bowl of iceberg lettuce with big chunks of tomato and ranch dressing or whatever is gross; a bowl of dark greens with little cherry tomatoes, good olives, olive oil-based dressing, raw mushrooms, turnip slices, a little bit of walnut/tuna/hard-boiled egg is delicious.
Basically:
1. Stop allowing yourself to give up.
2. Figure out how to make it a new, enjoyable reality rather than something horrible you're forcing yourself through.
It's entirely about mindset and willpower (barring medical conditions); once you've convinced yourself that living healthily is what you actually want everything else falls into place neatly as long as you have or know how to find knowledge about exercise, diet, &c.
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What I really want is a bicycle machine hooked up to an electrical generator. Something I could recharge electronics or a large battery with. Maybe one day.
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A simple one: stand up while watching a movie instead of slouching in a chair or bed. There's a free calorie burn right there.
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Your maths is correct, except your idea about how much calories you can burn with any reasonable exercise routine is way off.
I picked rope jumping (1074 calories for 200 pound people, see the second page of what I linked), and rounded down to keep it simple. (The calories burned are more for heavier people and less for lighter people for probably obvious reasons)
But the point was to show that even if you were able to do a really intense workout for as many hours a week as LB suggested, you still can't eat all the ice cream and expect no consequences.
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Yep, weight's far from the sole indicator of health. All sorts of different factors can do you in, which is part of why it's better to take a shotgun approach and deal with as many health issues as possible rather than >just< trying to burn calories. Won't do you any good if you still die in your '50s because you kept a vice that didn't contribute much to fat. Hell, meth is pretty much the ultimate weight loss tool, but you don't see people using it as a dietary supplement. Except in the sense 'round places like this where for some folks it's part of a balanced breakfast, dinner, teatime, supper, and midnight snack.
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Have you considered an all natural, plant based diet?
https://www.drmcdougall.com (https://www.drmcdougall.com)
This website is totally free. All the information about the life style changes, food, recipes, and more. I have several family members who are followers of this diet, and I can tell from their experience (and mine) that this is one of the best, of if not THE best way to go.
Dr. McDougall has about 40 years experience and research behind his diet plans. It's a lot to go into in a simple forum post, so I encourage you to go check out the site.
I've been working on starting this myself, and the last month or so I can already tell a difference between then and now. I recommend checking out the free Color Picture Book to give yourself a general overview of it.
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The big problem with 'just do this exercise and burn ALL THE CALORIES' approach is that it's not really viable on its own. A calorie is a unit of energy. You need to get that energy from somewhere, like fat. But fat is a long-term storage tissue, it's not meant for here and now - you can only exercise so much before your muscles decide 'fuck this, we're out for dinner'. People like long-distance runners are adapted for that, but someone who just starts exercising to slim down isn't.
This is not just theory - try burning just 250 kcal on a stationary bicycle in half an hour - exactly the half of Shadowlord proposes when converted to per hour - and tell me you can keep going at the same rate for the other half.
Exercise is good for another reason, in my experience - you start planning meals a bit more, watching what you eat so you don't waste your time, and disciplining yourself to stick to it. And that's the big part of it, because if you keep a positive net energy balance (i.e. in this case eat more than your baseline body expenditure + muscle maintenance/growth from the exercise expenditure) then you still will not lose weight.
I have been losing weight for half a year now (to the point where I have downgraded from an L size belt to an M-sized one - and I had to punch new holes in it this week), ironically, after I *stopped* exercising, mostly because I just plain don't eat nearly as much - I've recalibrated my appetite, I quit minor indulgences like some plain whole-wheat cookies every now and then and incorporated more protein into my diet. Although, considering my age, it might partially be hormonal as well, so bear that in mind.
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Also, if you push your muscles really hard for a long time (which bodybuilders do not actually recommend), it needs to get immediate energy from somewhere, and that place is not fat - is by breaking down the muscle tissue itself. So you will lose weight this way, but it will mostly be from muscle tissue, and reduced muscle tissue means reduced sedentary calorie burn. That's also what they seem to mean by your body entering "starvation mode". If you eat too little then your body switches from fat burning to protein burning in order to reduce your future energy needs: you end up eating your own muscles faster than you eat your fat stores.
This is another reasons crash diets do not work. If you overtrain and starve yourself, you will burn off muscle mass and think "great I lost weight". But when you eat properly again, the body really wants to rebuild your lean body mass: so it starts rebuilding the damaged/famished muscle tissues, and people interpret this as "gaining weight" (the "bounce"). This is why it's important to train a sensible amount, and to first stabilize your diet, then cut out the right amount of calories from the diet so that you lose e.g. 0.5kg per week. At this rate it will mostly be bodyfat being burnt and it will be more sustainable.